Sunday 3 September 2017

My latest resolution - secular/ alt-right media fasting...

I don't take much note of the mass media, and there are very few Christian blogs which I like and which post regularly - but up to now, I have continued to read a handful of secular anti-leftist blogs and follow blog aggregators (variously self-styled as paleo-conservative, alt-right, neoreactionary... those who in practice put politics before Christianity; and when religious put some Church before Christianity).

And apparently, quite a lot of my readership come via such sources.

These 'alternative' media have served to keep me in touch with the mainstream news - at one remove, and via a different lens. So I have continued to make tactiacal, to some extent topical, 'political' comments on this blog - and these posts tend to be among the most 'viewed'.

Well, I have decided - from today - to dump this vestigial connection with the mainstream; because it has a bad effect on me - it encourages me to think along secular lines, and to develop opinions on current topics which are 'pragmatic' (i,e within the frame of mainstream politics) rather than fully principled and ideal.

I think this bad habit was encouraged by the apparent good new of the pro-Brexit vote in England in June 2016 - in that I assumed that because the vote represented a rejection of elite opinion, it was also a possible sign of hope that there would be a far more radical reappraisal of principles... and that a spiritual awakening was a possibility.

Paradoxically, this encouraged me to scan the media, albeit the 'alternative' media for indirect signs of such a revival - but even this circumscribed engagement was nonetheless an engagement - and I think it has done me harm, has set my mind working in a counter-productive way.

Therefore, it is my intention to take matters even further than I have in the direction of total rejection of the mass media agenda - to include rejection of the alternative media.

This is an era when not only is (as always) the good an enemy to the best; but any good short of the best is in practice evil. When the socio-political system is built-up falsehood, then anything which fails to reject this foundation must be building towards evil.

Here and now, we cannot answer even the simplest of socio-political questions, we cannot give the simplest of opinions, without exposing and rejecting the false metaphysical assumptions behind all such questions.

All our shorty-expressed views will, therefore, seem foolish, crazy, evil or just incomprehensible. This is a fact of modern life, and unavoidable. We might as well get used to it. But at any rate, we should not even be trying to meet culture half-way. 

In a sense, this makes life simple - because tactics are discarded at a stroke: no tactics, all strategy; no compromise, all idealism - we just need to be truth-full, all the time, and about everything.

Simple - albeit very difficult.


2 comments:

Bruce Charlton said...

@JW - Yes, you are right on my views about Myers-Briggs.

In mainstream psychology, only HJ Eysenck seems to have deeply understood what he was doing in measuring personality.

In terms of deep insight - Rudolf Steiner seems to have approached closer to a genuine typology with his version of the Classical-Medieval Four Humours/ Temperaments classification. This is the only one in which I can easily classify actual individuals I know:

http://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA057/English/AP1987/19090304p01.html

Or for an audio recording:

http://www.rudolfsteineraudio.com/anthroeverydaylife/4anthroeverdaylife4fourtemperament.mp3

FO said...

Bruce, thanks for all of your great blog posts. Regarding the subject of other blogs, I have always wondered if you are familiar with the blog, "One Cosmos". The proprietor and all the regulars mention your blog frequently and it seems that you and they would be kindred spirits. Regards and best wishes, FO